Backup Buddy Reviews

This page lists aggregated reviews of Backup Buddy from different sources if available as well as user reviews by other WPscoop visitors. If you have experience with Backup Buddy be sure to add your own review!

Together with my in-depth feature and price comparisons these user reviews are meant to help people make the right decision for the best backup plugin.

Backup Buddy User Reviews

6 Reviews

I’m very unsatisfied with BackUpBuddy. After months of thinking about whether it was the right product for me or not, I decided to give it a go, and it’s such a shame they don’t give you any way to try it before you buy it, nor do they give you your money back if it doesn’t work or you don’t like it.

Support is ridiculous, each ticket takes between 3 and 7 days to get a reply.

There is no forum to ask your question or browse previously addressed issues.

The many cool functionalities the plugin provides, work like 10% of the times, on the same installations in which other free plugins work perfectly.

The migrator needs you to type in DB details manually, even if a previous wp-config.php already exists. Every time you do a migration/push you have to clear the whole directory, and import the new site.

Deployment is useless, it never works for a reason or another. When it does, it takes forever to transfer a few files because they are being sent one by one instead of being zipped on the source and unzipped on the destination.

This is supposed to save you time, instead it’s a bloody nightmare every time you have to use it.

Save your money and use something else (UpdraftPlus, Duplicator, just to name two).

I purchased BackupBuddy based off a lot of good reviews on the web. It worked for a month then stopped working. Backup would generate up to a certain file size and fail. Support was unhelpful and kept pointing me to talk to the server host to solve the issue and vice versa. I just gave up on it after couple days of it not being resolved and moved on to another plugin. Waste of money ($300) and I will never purchase a product of theirs again.

I thought Backup Buddy was one of the top backup plugins for WordPress, but in my experience it’s definitely one of the worst. Like others, I have never been able to reliably use it on any site I have worked on. And definitely don’t try it on a large site since it’ll time out every time. Try something better like WP Time Capsule. The importbuddy.php script failed last night trying to restore a backup to my local machine.

Hi,I just bought the developer license backupbuddy and I wished I have read these opinions before buying. I thought that as I liked ithemes security plugin and it was working, the backupbuddy would work as smooth as well.But not, it gave me a ton of errors and I tried on two websites and it did the same. I never got the backup as easily as they said on their website.So, I asked for refund and still waiting.A plugin that needs work on it, my hours to make it work, it is not worthwhile for me.So, my opinion, try it before buying it. But… they don’t have a free trial.

Not recommended. This is the first time I am asking for a refund and they have this funny no refunds policy, how convenient!!

Only half works. I haven’t been able to get this thing to do a complete backup for years, it constantly times out. Instead I can only do a database back up, then manually back up the rest of my site.I’m not the only one either, a lot of others are having the same issue. Overrated and overpriced. Should be half the price because it only half works.

On their website, iThmes claims that BackupBuddy does a “Full Site Restore – BackupBuddy handles restoring your entire site back to its original glory, including all uploaded media library files, themes and plugin files.”

However, when one of the site’s wordpress authors uses non-ASCII-characters (what the iThemes support team calls “international” characters), i.e. characters which are a integral part of most written languages but exceed the 26 characters known to the English speaking world, THE BACKUP WILL NOT BE RESTORED CORRECTLY EVEN ON THE SAME SERVER WHERE THE SITE WORKED FLAWLESSLY BEFORE – images and assets will be missing all over the website because their names are mangled in the process. I learned this the hard way when trying to restore a site, and ended up with a frustrated customer and a lot of extra work diagnosing and then fixing the issue.

iThemes support explained to me they are aware of the problem, but blame WordPress and the user for this, they suggest using some third party plugins to fix the issue.

What bugs me about this is several things:

(a) it’s so easy to issue a warning on either the iThemes website, on the plugin page, or when restoring the site, but they chose not to do that, even though they are aware of the issue.(b) there’s a way to detect actual or potential issues and warn the user, either when the site’s language is one that contains “international” characters (I’m not aware of any European language with the exception of English and Italian, let alone Asian and African languages), or when a backup actually contains a file with those characters in the filename.(c) there’s a way of fixing this in the background when restoring the site.(d) my support ticket was put on hold, my answer to iThemes’ reply was never addressed.

So I cannot recommend BackupBuddy to anyone who runs a site in any other language than English (or Italian).

To the rest of the world, I’d also hesitate to recommend it, because I think that not addressing problems right away when there’s the potential of disastrous consequences for your customers (i.e. a restored site not working properly, which might not even be obvious on first sight) is not building trust on my part.

Disclaimer: I own a lifetime (GOLD) license for BackupBuddy, host quite a few wordpress sites for myself, and for customers, and I have a bit of experience developing web applications.

I have been trying to get Backup Buddy working reliably for almost a year now, without much luck. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Backups constantly time-out while zipping files. I have tried many, many variations to the settings to try and resolve this, but frankly, I simply don’t trust this product. Today, I ran an update for the Backup Buddy plugin that upgraded it to Ver. 7. Maybe this will improve things. In the meantime, I am using the free version of UpDraft Plus with the Migrator add-on ($30) and it is working perfectly. I will be writing to I-Themes to seek a refund on their product if it continues to be unrelaible – but I’ll wait and see how the latest version works first. To be fair, the one and only time I used Backup Buddy to migrate a website to a new domain it worked, but it’s been very unrelaible doing backups of a multitude of sites I manage for clients ever since!

Firstly, I use four different hosting accounts, two on SiteGround, one Maxim, and one on Bluehost and none of them are the cheapo accounts, so hosting issues might show up with one or possibly two accounts, but not all four.

Once a site’s backup site starts to reach 300MB or so, Backup Buddy becomes very hit and miss with backups not finishing or becoming corrupt.

Even on my smaller sites, the backups are failing.

I saw a few people mentioning that Backup Buddy needed constant maintenance to keep it running. Who has time to watch over a utility that’s supposed to save time?

I’m now testing Updraft Plus on a couple sites where the backup size is quite large and haven’t had any issues.

I was using Duplicator to back up the many client sites that we have developed and support but decided to purchase BackupBuddy to save us some time with this process. Much to my dismay I am not very happy with the plugin. It takes us more time than before to backup sites and the backup files are much larger than those produced by Duplicator (a free plugin). It takes forever to download locally and because of the file sizes have yet to complete an external backup to our Dropbox account (one of then BackupBuddy options). BackupBuddy sounded so promising based on its marketing but in reality didn’t work well for us. It was a waste of money and a lot of time for us.

Backup Buddy has continuously been giving me problems for the past few months. Full backups rarely ever finish, if ever, and the past 3-4 restores that I have tried to do using importbuddy have given me constant problems, including a ‘this server has timed out’ message.

I used to think that backupbuddy was a good plugin, but it has been getting increasingly worse as time goes on. I would never suggest using this plugin ever again. It is just awful.

Back up buddy is very helpful plugin and it comes with all the features we need to back up. But it has a problem, it need continuous maintenance. We can not predict when will it work and when not. Other wise it’s 5 out of 5 back up plugin.

And thanks Thomas for providing a nice review platform where every user can raise his voice.

I’ve used BackupBuddy (BUB) for several years and it has saved my bacon more than once. It works with any WordPress theme and does either a FULL backup or just the databases.

The migration features pay for themselves if you manage more than a couple sites.

Cost: It’s not cheap, but no worthwhile insurance is cheap. I would suggest that it’s best when purchased with some of the other iThemes plugins, themes, and/or training. (I’m a fan of iThemes products and services.)

The only real trouble I’ve had with BUB is when using a caching plugin.

BackupBuddy is genuinely one of a handful of plugins that I would not want to be without. Sure, there’s no free option, but it’s a bit like buying insurance for your car: you wish you didn’t have to pay for it – but boy, are you glad it’s there when something goes wrong.

Setup is straightforward, but you need to consider where you’re going to store your backups – because storing them locally defeats the object to an extent. There are plenty of options for remote storage (I use Amazon Web Services S3, which works great and costs next to nothing).

Being able to schedule regular backups is great, and you can configure the plugin to alert you by email if there’s ever a problem creating one.

And one of the biggest benefits: the website migration functionality. With one install file and the backup in question you can migrate (or indeed restore) a site in minutes.

If you get that slight feeling of panic every time you update your other plugins, wondering if they’re going to break your site, it’s nice to know you’ve got a way out should the worst happen.

I have been using this plugin for around 6 months. IMO it has a lot of problems and it is a constant maintenance issue with 9 websites. Back up errors on site, plugins etc. Today it will back up on dashboard, later it may backup and update plugins on ithemesync. I do not want to invest anymore money in extra sites or backup service. I am always having problems migrating sites. Their forum is loaded with the same problems from everyone. Their support is good. It has to be, with all the support issues. I do not feel the video tutorial on migration is basic 101 user friendly. That is not unusual though. Many theme developers videos are not very good. To much assuming buyer knows terminology or more than they do. Think I will give bacWpup a try. Thanks for the voting reviews. This backup issue is always a problem.

I so agree with you. I believe BackupBuddy is a good program, but it’s a constant maintenance issue. One day it works, the next it doesn’t. Back up errors all the time. Have you found a better alternative?

it is very good. not a lot mem use but it is really overpriced. 80$ for 2 so 40/year for 1 site is a lot if you can thing how much money needed spend if you waiting soemthing in return from your investement.

A very solid backup plugin that has served me well for a long time without any problems. It is easy to use and backups for my sites are stored in several locations. The recent big update has made it even better!

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Rating

Rating on WordPress.org

Backup Buddy is not listed in the WordPress.org plugin directory and because of that no reviews are available there.

Backup Buddy Features

With Backup Buddy you can use 15 out of 21 features that I track for WordPress backup plugins in my comparison. Click the link to see a list of all available features.

Please note that I only track features as reported by the developers in this review and comparison. I can make no judgement over how well the features listed below will work for you. I recommend you test Backup Buddy and some of its competitors yourself before deciding.

Backup Buddy Alternatives

I have also reviewed many competing products that allow you to manage multiple WP blogs. There are several worthy Backup Buddy alternatives you should consider before making your decision on which WP manager to use. Follow the links below to see my reviews of all alternatives to Backup Buddy.